


Post-Traumatic Hauntings

by mizdiz



Category: The Walking Dead (Comics), The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Angst, Child Death, F/M, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 21:45:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19894819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mizdiz/pseuds/mizdiz
Summary: Carol is being haunted, and Daryl can only watch.post-s9, s10 trailer inspired





	Post-Traumatic Hauntings

There's comfort in routine; tricks one into believing they have control, as if any millisecond of living is anything but entropic. Carol checks the locks on the doors and windows, like she does every night, starting with the living room, leading into the kitchen, where she pushes on the double hung windows a couple times for good measure, making sure they didn't unlock themselves while her back was turned.

She wipes down the sink. It's not dirty, but it's a normal task that people do, so she does it. She dusts crumbs off the left side of the counter, then the right, before hanging her washcloth over top of the faucet to dry. She opens the cabinet door adjacent to the stove and takes down one of her mismatched glasses. She fills it halfway with water, takes a swallow, replaces that swallow by topping the glass off, and she sets off to bed, turning down the oil lamps as she goes.

It's on her way up to her room that she's greeted by a ghost.

Except that's not the right word, because he's too opaque, too sturdy. She does nothing at first, she doesn't react at all, staring mildly at Henry staring right back at her from the top of the stairs.

His lips are moving but no sound is coming out. He has wide, scared eyes, his hands clutching at his bleeding throat. There's a jagged slice in his flesh that hugs the circumference of his neck. Blood beads, then bubbles, then streams down, staining the fabric of the last shirt of his she ever washed. She remembers taking it off the clothesline and folding and placing it neatly inside his dresser drawer. Now it's soaked in crimson, and she'll never get those stains out, no matter how hard she scrubs.

Mom. That's the word that's on his lips. Mom. Help me. Mommy, please.

Henry never once called her mommy—he came into her life too old and traumatized for that—but then, she remembers a fever she had once, where her temperature shot up to 105, and even though she was a grown-ass woman, as she sweated and fever dreamt, she begged for her mommy to make it better.

She imagines that same childish impulse would overtake you during a decapitation.

When strong hands take hold of her shoulders, that's when Carol realizes she's been screaming. Is still screaming, in fact, her throat raw as Daryl grips her tight, asking her over and over to tell him what's turned her into a banshee in the middle of the night. Vaguely, she's aware of water seeping into her socks, her glass no longer in her hand, but instead lying on the floor with a chip in the rim.

"Get back to bed," Daryl barks out, and it takes Carol a minute to realize he isn't talking to her. When she looks back up to the top of the stairs she still sees wide, scared eyes, but they aren't Henry's. Lydia stands in the spot where Henry bled just moments ago, before scattering away at Daryl's command.

Attention back on her, Daryl cups the back of her head and bends down to make them eye-level. He searches her face, which is tearstained and void of color. She's replaced screaming with hyperventilating, and Daryl is saying something about taking deep breaths. Take deep breaths, Carol, or you're gonna faint. She's not sure if he's telling her that, or if the logical part of her is trying to rein herself in by giving instructions.

There's an ache in her lungs as she gulps down air. Daryl breathes with her like a father coaching a mother through Lamaze. Time ticks by, but she doesn't know by how much. She thinks it's a lot. She thinks they may have been down here a really long time.

He gets her breathing regulated, gets her heart beating slower, and it's only then that he repeats his earlier question:

"What happened?"

Carol shuts her eyes, a few latent tears sliding down and dripping off the end of her nose.

"I saw him, Daryl," she says. "He was here in the house."

Daryl doesn't ask who 'he' is.

Instead, he says, "It wasn't real, sweetheart." It's a statement that's meant to be reassuring, not cruel, but it hurts her anyway. He doesn't understand, and Daryl always understands.

"He needed my help but I couldn't do anything; she'd already cut his throat."

She's not making any sense to him, she knows it, because he doesn't try to placate her with words again. He pulls her to him in an all-encompassing embrace, and holds her until she gets enough feeling back in her legs to take herself up the stairs, over the spot where his blood should be. 

The floor is perfectly clean.

*

The air is crisp and smells like dew. Dawn is on her way, a hazy glow sneaking in through the trees as the sun peeks up above the horizon. Carol walks deftly on the balls of her feet, missing all the twigs that would snap under her weight and give her away. She's got her bow and arrow in tow, and up ahead she sees a doe nibbling on a leaf, unsuspecting. She arms her bow and aims.

With a snap, her arrow goes soaring. It flies straight and precise across the short distance, and it hits its target dead on. The deer makes a horrible sound when the arrow pierces her straight through the jugular, and suddenly Carol isn't holding a bow, she's holding a pistol. Suddenly, the deer gushing blood from its neck is a little girl gushing blood from her head, staining the flowers she'd been looking at just moments before.

The deer still has a leaf in its mouth.

The little girl still has her eyes open, staring lifelessly at the petals.

A hand clamps over Carol's mouth, and in her ear she hears, "Shh, shh, it's okay, you're okay. You can't scream out here, though, I don't know what's nearby."

She screams anyway, panicked and muffled against the palm of Daryl's hand. He wraps himself around her from behind, and doesn't shush her again. He waits her out, burying his face in her hair, trying to stay steady against her trembling.

That night they have venison stew.

She excuses herself from the table.

In the bathroom upstairs she dry heaves and sobs, remembering the way she painted the flowers red with a bullet and the back of Lizzie's skull.

She spends the night in the fetal position on the cold tile floor.

*

She waits for her third haunting, terrified that every time she rounds a corner she's going to come face-to-face with the ghost she wants to see the least.

Days pass.

A whole week.

She can feel Daryl's eyes on her almost everywhere she goes. She can feel him sizing her up, looking for any signs she might be close to crumpling again. She serves him sweet smiles that she knows be doesn't buy, because she can't lie to him, but he doesn't call her on it. He just waits, too.

It's the silliest thing that triggers the detonator this time.

She's down by the creek, sitting on a rock, braiding her hair. Daryl is off gathering firewood. She runs her fingers through her locks, still not used to having long hair even after all this time. She doesn't care much about it, could chop it all off right now and not give a damn, but there's some distant part of her that still gets a thrill out of spiting Ed, even though it's been years since she drove the pickaxe through his skull.

She finishes her braid and goes to loop her hair tie around the end, when the elastic gives out and snaps, and the sound is like a summoning incantation; it's dark magic that calls the demons to rise. She already knows what she's going to see when she looks across the water at the other side of the creek.

Sophia stands up straight, staring at her mother, motionless. She's a bony little thing, small and meek, not fit for this world. Still, Carol's arms long to hold her. She can smell the baby powder she'd put on her to keep the heat rash along the band of her training bra dry. She can hear the lilt of her gentle voice. She can feel the soft skin of her hands that never got blood on them, meanwhile Carol has dozens of people's lives etched in the lines of her palms like tallies.

Like mother like daughter? Yeah right.

Sophia clutches the doll Daryl almost died retrieving. Her hair is brushed, and her clothes are clean. She's healthy and freckled and yet her stare is so piercing that Carol tastes acid on the back of her throat.

The walker appears out of nowhere, clamping its teeth down on her baby's neck and sinking them into her flesh, poisoning her irreparably. 

"Mommy!" Sophia screams from across the creek, her doll falling from her hands as she raises her arms and reaches fruitlessly towards Carol.

Sophia did call her mommy, always, because she was an innocent child who had no right existing in this filth.

But that doesn't make it hurt less.

Carol screams for her daughter; calls her name like a reckoning. She loads an arrow and shoots it at the walker, but it glides right through its forehead, her hallucination solid until it's convenient for it not to be. She drops her bow to the side with a clatter and is going to jump into the water and swim across, but just as she's about to make the leap, hands clamp around her waist.

"Let me go," she spits at Daryl.

"Carol, she isn't there." He sounds so sad.

"Let me go, Daryl."

"Sweetheart, listen to me. She isn't there. None of them are." Carol stops fighting enough that Daryl can turn her around to look at her. He lets go of her waist and cups her face. "Carol," he says. "They're gone."

He says it like a doctor coming out of surgery and having to confess that 'they didn't make it.' He says it like it's new information; like he's not sure she's lucid enough to remember all her children are dead.

Carol takes a deep breath.

"Then why won't they leave me alone?" she whispers, lower lip trembling. Daryl ducks his head and places a soft kiss on her mouth, willing it to still.

"'Cause you ain't never said goodbye," he says, caressing her cheekbones with his thumbs. "'Cause you bury them but don't mourn them."

"I can't," she tells him, heart aching. "I don't know how."

Daryl nods.

"Then I'll help you learn," he says. 

"That's not your job."

He brings her in again, closer and tighter than ever. His lips brush against her temple as he promises her,

"I won't let you get haunted alone."

**Author's Note:**

> yeah idk where tf this came from. was doing something else, and then suddenly had to open a google doc and vomit this out on my phone at 3am. what a trailer that was, huh? hoo boy.
> 
> anyway,  
> -diz


End file.
